Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Obama's Muslim Brotherhood Agenda

By Alan
Caruba

It is a
task just to keep up with the conflicts dividing America, so it is no surprise
that many Americans are unsure of what occurred during the “Arab Spring” that
began in 2011 and its aftermath since then. It is likely, too, that most do not
know who or what the Muslim Brotherhood is, but it has been around a long time
seeking to control events in the Middle East and North African nations. It also
plays an astonishing and frightening role in America.

“The
Brotherhood’s peak in the United States came with the victory of Barack Obama
in the U.S. presidential election of 2008,” says Walid Phares in his book, “The
Lost Spring; U.S. Policy in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid” ($27.00,
Palgrave Macmillan). “The network, via its front groups, supported the
campaign, not as a formal entity, but as a prelude to receiving influence
within American bureaucracies and the new administration when Obama took
office.”

“The
factions within the global lobby had an overarching common interest: to push
back against the forces of secular democracy in the Arab world and Iran, and
thus against their representatives and friends within the United States and
Europe, for the real threat to the Islamists in the East was a secular liberal
revolution backed by the West.”

Phares is
an internationally acknowledged and respected expert on terrorism, the Middle
East, and events that reflect Islamism, the movement to impose strict Islamic
law—Sharia—and other cultural restrictions globally, but most specifically in
nations where Islam is the dominant faith.

It’s
important to know that the Muslim Brotherhood has been around in the U.S. for
decades, as often as not working through front organizations like the Council
on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Student Association, and
others. Using petrodollars, it has supported the creation of Islamic studies
departments in universities and maintains a communications program to present
through the U.S. media its interpretation of events and thus influence public
perceptions and opinion.

Obama and
the Muslim Brotherhood members who joined his administration after he took
office in 2009 were caught completely off guard, however, by the Arab Spring,
the name given to a number of revolutions to cast off despots ruling the Middle
East. It began in Tunisia, spread swiftly to Egypt, then to Libya, and affected
events in other nations of the region. It was led initially by the youth that
were connected to one another by communications technology such as iphones and
the Internet. They were joined by secular groups, Muslims who did not wish to
live under the repression of fanatical Islamists. Swiftly, ordinary Muslims,
women, and others joined them.

In
retrospect, a nation whose embassies from Lebanon to Tanzania had been under
attack by al Qaeda for decades and which had suffered 9/11, an act of Islamic
terrorism on its homeland, would seem unlikely to elect a man whose father was
a Muslim, who had spent some of the years of his youth in Muslim Indonesia, and
whose brother was an active member of the Brotherhood, to be President. But he
was. Twice. This represents almost suicidal stupidity.

From the
very beginning of his first term, the White House announced that he would take
steps to change America’s image in the Arab and Muslim world. Pharas noted that
his first interview was with al Arabiya TV on January 29, 2009 to assert that
“The United States was the aggressor in the region” and that “the Jihadists
were not the aggressors against humanity.”

There was
no denying that the U.S., in the wake of 9/11, had been at war with the Taliban
in Afghanistan since 2001 and in 2003 had waged a war in Iraq to rid it of
Saddam Hussein. Both wars had the intention to introduce and help establish democracy
in those nations. By 2009 Americans were war-weary and Obama made it clear in
his campaign that he would pull our troops out and talked of shutting down
Guantanamo detention center where the worst captured terrorists were being
held.

Within two
months of taking office, Obama went to Cairo where he identified America as the cause of the ills
afflicting the Middle East. “When millions of young men and women hit the
streets of Tehran in mid-June 2009, they initially protested voter corruption
and the forced reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinijad as president. Later they
pushed against the entire regime. The world,” said Pharas, “witnessed a moment
in which the regime in Iran was very close to crumbling.” Obama’s response was
not to support the democracy movement, saying he did not want to “meddle” in
Iranian elections.

This was
repeated during the Arab Spring as, time and again, Obama withheld support for
the outpouring of desire for democracy in the affected nations, waiting until
the Muslim Brotherhood, the only organized faction, was able to seize the
movements in order to impose their own control. In Egypt, the people had to
fill the streets of Cairo and other cities a second time to oust them from
power.

How
successfully has the Brotherhood infiltrated the circles of power in the U.S.?Huma Abedin was the Deputy Chief
of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Azizh Al-Hibri serves on the
U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom; Areef Alikhan serves in the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) along with Mohamed Alibiary and Kareem
Shora who are members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; and Mohamed
Magid who is a member of the DHS Countering Violent Extremism Working Group.
There are others. Too many others.

Obama made
sure that the word “terrorism” disappeared from the government’s vernacular.
When soldiers at Fort Hood were murdered by a jihadist, it was classified as
“workplace violence” and the whole concept of the “War on terror” disappeared.
It was replaced by the charge that any criticism of al Qaeda and other jihadist
groups was “Islamaphobia.”

Obama
would tell Americans that “I consider it as my responsibility as President of
the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they
appear.” Instead, we had a President who would seek to make a deal with Iran,
the foremost supporter of terrorism worldwide and a nation determined to make
its own nuclear weapons to intimidate the Middle East and the world.

We have a
President who turned his back on the forces in the Middle East seeking to
install democratic governments. That struggle is far from over, but they and
the world must wait until Obama leaves office before real progress can be made
against the Muslim Brotherhood and the jihadists.

For now,
one of the most powerful Islamists in the world resides in the White House.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.